Crashed Cisitalia – MoMA car?

• 

It’s not that we want to be melodramatic, but we just love the – er – drama of this shot. What do we see? In the first place there’s the car. Yes, a Cisitalia 202 Coupe – rare to this day. But it’s the expression of the people surrounding it that make this picture so good. The sturdy policemen, the eager boys and the startled women – both of them expressing their shock by bringing their hands to their mouth.

Back to the car. With its sleek Pininfarina fastback styling, turbine-blade wheel discs and 1100cc Fiat engine it must have been like a thing from another world back in the US of right after the War. But what’s more – it’s been photographed because of a crash. That pool of water seeping from under its gracious aluminium body was caused by it ramming into something else. What? We don’t know. What happened to it? We don't know.

We did find another picture of that very car, taken before the crash. Or maybe after it had been repaired? What the rear of it looked like? There you go. From there we can see it wears a New York registration, issued in 1948. Could it be the car that was later famously put on display in the city’s Museum of Modern Art? A 202 is exhibited to this day in the MoMA, but we understand that is another car then the one originally shown in 1951. According to an article in Automobile Quarterly, John Wheelock Freeman bought that car in 1950 from an ad in the New York Times. It states “Nothing of it was known before it arrived in the US and all efforts to trace its early history have been fruitless.” While clearly taken in the US - could this picture shed a new light on it?

(Text Jeroen Booij, picture courtesy Geoff Dawes)
 

Aggiunga un commento...